What opinion just makes you look like you aged 30 years
It was totally uncool to remove the headphone jack from my device, man.
I doubt you’ll find anyone here that disagrees with you. I was going to get an older pixel but I got a 6 instead and I’m still grieving the loss of my headphone jack.
At least we can get USB-C headphones and use the charging port as a headphone jack.
But then you can’t charge at the same time, no good if you want to plug your phone into some speakers and charge it at the same time
Wireless charging?
My take: cables are a sustainable, effective and ELEGANT solution. Most wireless solutions fall under the definition of over-engineering.
Cable: a properly lengthened cheap rope that magically transfers information, power and anchor stuff together.
Wireless: two antenna, encoding of all kind, radiations, BATTERIES, higher chance to lose stuff, degrading of quality (Bluetooth).
Inefficient, over priced, less reliable
Things should be made to last and not be made to intentionally break after a short time.
how is that a boomer opinion?
Many of the younger generations seem to accept that things don’t last/break easily. I come from a time where there was a wiring diagram for the TV pasted on the inside back cover. Washing machines and other devices often had the schematics included. Repairing your stuff and keeping it running was the norm back then. Even if you couldn’t, you probably had a neighbour who could. Planned obsolescence is a relatively new thing.
Planned obsolescence was first introduced for lightbulb, according to Veritasium video on YT. But for most things it is relatively new thing (20 years).
Things used to be made like this. Only boomers are old enough to remember buying an iron for life.
You can still buy things with very long lifetime but they are very expensive, the results of making cheaper things that break earlier is that more people can afford to buy them.
This is of course what most companies want but is also makes a lot of products available to people who couldn’t afford them earlier which for many is a good thing.
I think it’s a fair trade.
Do not share your name online.
Don’t tell me what to do Jeffrey.
I’m not subscribing to anything. If I buy something, it’s fully functional, and it’s mine. There is no ongoing relationship between me and the manufacturer. Done.
Anything that doesn’t incur an ongoing cost to provide should be legally prohibited from being sold as a “subscription.”
Not everything needs a law against it. I’m just not going to buy into their fucked up system.
Except more and more companies are hopping on this gravy train because they can get away with it. At some point (and that point may be now already, depending on the sector), it’s going to be difficult-to-impossible to buy anything without this subscription bullshit.
The only thing I’m willing to pay a subscription for are the essentials that have no product alternative, i.e. utilities - power, water, Internet. I refuse to pay for streaming when they used to sell DVDs and CDs with the same content. I refuse to pay for game subscription services when you used to be able to buy the games outright. I refuse to pay for software-as-a-service or bullshit like cloud service integrations for smart home stuff. If I don’t own it, I don’t buy it.
At least for utilities you can reframe it as paying for parcels of utility, and then consuming them, like you do for food. Middleman bullshit like cloud services that refuse to let you just self-host can screw off. Having to spend money to spend extra resources to deal with a 3rd party is obnoxious, doubly so when they just decide they don’t want to support it anymore and pull the plug.
I mean, that’s basically what FOSS is about.
Especially when it comes to expensive equipment like cars, computers, printers, etc.
who doesn’t want a subscription for heated seats on their $100k car? /s
I’m working on this, the subscription model has gotten so expensive now that literally everything uses it. Do you have any tips besides “just pirate everything”?
Depends on the media, buy from bandcamp, steam
Bandcamp is the move.
Just pirate some of the things?
@TheBaldness Do you pay taxes? It’s literally a subscription on the state :)
Only because the late fees and collection agencies are to die for :)
Single player modes in games shouldn’t require internet connection.
That fact that’s considered a boomer take makes me sad
Exactly this
Smart tech in general is annoying and dumb. I want my TV to just be a tv with inputs, I don’t need built in firmware and updates to shove ads in my face. I don’t want my car to have a touch screen to adjust the A/C, just give me a knob or buttons.
I DO NOT WANT MY TV TO HAVE A FUCKING CAMERA OR A MICROPHONE
We need electric vehicles with the interiors and exteriors copied from consumer cars from the 90s.
Like that Hyundai concept? That thing was rad. I’d drive the hell out of an EV that looks like an AE86.
I think that one is pretty popular. Popular “smart” products are usually only smart to and make the manufacturer some extra scratch after sale.
And car touchscreens are either disliked, considered a status symbol, or considered necessary in order toobtains another feature. Very few people actually like them.
100% agreed.
Like, cram android onto an underpowered SOC and it’s just incredibly frustrating to use.
Car-ware is the absolute worst. I remember reading an article on Hacker News 10 years ago saying they should just be a blank canvas that our cellphone decides what goes on it.
Every time a new technology comes out we think it’s going to make our lives so much more simple, but what really happens is the expectations of what we should be capable of doing increase and as a result we take on more responsibilities. One example is cars. You can travel further now, right? Only, now it’s normal to drive an hour to commute to work. Or now you have a wider area of travel you’re expected to make to visit people you know.
My boomer opinion is that smartphones have done this in a big way. I’m expected now to be available 24/7 to respond to texts on a moments notice. Not responding looks rude. I’ve been in workplaces that had a culture of checking work messages on Teams on cellphones outside of hours (which I refuse to do). My friends will have long group messages that I’m expected to keep up with. All of this responsibility adds up to more stress than we had in a pre cellphone era. And that hasn’t translated to better lives for us in the end. There are advantages and I appreciate many of the things our high tech era gives us. But part of me longs for that era where we just had to trust that people would show up to get togethers at the agreed upon times. When conversations were special because we didn’t just have 24/7 access to each other. Where we had to decipher maps to take road trips. Where we were more present with each other. I was born in the 90’s which puts me in a strange generation of people that only kind of remember what it was like before.
Out of all of this, I really don’t miss having to decipher maps. I’m down with the rest of what you said though!
Yeahhh, that one doesn’t really play into the rest of what I said 😅 That’s just nostalgia. It’s hard to argue that Google Maps hasn’t made our lives easier in just about every way we use it unlike the other tech I mentioned…
I’ve tried to come up with the perfect “middle ground” between a full-fledged smartphone and an old dumbphone. GPS is one of the modern features I would want to keep for sure.
When contacting government or a service provider I want to call and talk to a human, dammit.
And don’t make me listen to all the prompts to only have to guess which is the correct one, and then be transferred because I was incorrect.
5 menu choices later
“Sorry! Our call center is not open today!”
Music in restaurants and bars is just too loud. I know why the music is loud, but I am still going to shake my fist at it like Grandpa Simpson.
Same. It’s getting worse over time too, I can hardly hear anything anyone is saying in restaurants and bars anymore.
I felt my inner boomer grow stronger after writing that.
I’ve thought this since I was young. Background music? Cool, keep it quiet so we can talk.
Does this mean loud music is bad? No, I’ve been a put my head in the PA speakers metal head since I was young too. But I don’t expect a waiter to serve me then.
Beyond that, it’s a known problem that as you get older audio distractions become more severe, and I’m sure there’s a neurodivergent dimension to it too, so it’s one of those things where we are actively punishing people for wanting to be out and socialise. Also sure it’s one of those things where everyone thinks they have to do it but don’t
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Cars shouldn’t be loaded with user-facing technology. Bring back analog dashboards and buttons for climate control!
I just want to be able to adjust the stereo without looking away from the road. Is that too much to ask?
Interesting fact: I just got a new ev (so a battery hooked up to a computer with wheels) - and it has buttons! It also has dials for sound and climate.
Now to be fair it also takes interacting with a touchscreen to turn on the heated seats, but I’d say it’s progress in the right direction.
What EV did you buy?
Iconiq 5. I can honestly say I really enjoy it (and I’m not a car person).
Bring back stick-shift, too. People shouldn’t be driving if they have no grasp of the mass and inertia of their car. We should be able to disengage the engine at will. And we should have to pay attention when we drive.
Algorithms that try to suggest me content are universally bad, and all searches should provide results based solely on the terms, syntax, and language entered. Same with anything that tries to provide me content based on data harvested about my location or demographic.
I used to be mad at algorythms suggesting things that is disliked. But then I realised that it would be rather scary if they were right.
Never have I ever benefited from Google or Amazon or anyone changing my search string for me. Even if I do misspell something, I’m gonna click on the “did you mean x instead?” link myself, because I don’t trust the 50/50 mixed results anyway. But 90% of the time I’m gonna be immediately scrambling to put the double quotes back in, which it’s also gonna ignore half the time.
Hard agree. Sometimes I’m searching for something very specific and esoteric, and the results spam me with unrelated nonsense because the search engine thinks it knows better than I do
Some alternative frontends resolve this. Invidious for example is a youtube front end. There are public instances. Most popular sites have them.
Yes! I’ve started using Invidious more and more when I’m on PC, but there are also addons that make YouTube itself more tolerable.
I’ve been using LibreTube on my Android phone, and it’s so much better.
Yeah.
Invidious is pretty good in android Firefox like when you “add to homescreen”. The other browser add-ons won’t avoid the algorithm I think?
I use newpipe. I found libretube seemed to stop working more than newpipe but maybe time for another look!
I was actually using newpipe + sponsorblock before switching to Libretube. There’s only been once that I’ve had to manually switch the piped instance so far, but I just prefer Libretube’s UI. Newpipe worked great, too. Both very good apps. You can’t go wrong with either imo
I think it has its place but it should absolutely be optional. Yeah they suck but the YouTube algorithm is responsible for like 70% of my knowledge base.
I miss accidentally finding the most random stuff on YouTube way back before they started pushing monetized content, but it’s been a very long time
I like that Lemmy and Masto don’t have those fucking algorithms. It’s a relief.
What is your opinion on Bluesky? Their default feed is chronological, but they do have algorithms. They’re actually moving towards custom algorithms, so you can build your own or use someone else’s, delete, pin, reorder them. It’s like different feeds. I like that implementation personally.
I couldn’t say, they’re closed to new users. I’ve been on the wait list for a long time, but no joy.
I’m skeptical that it ultimately won’t just turn into Twitter 2.0
Actually, the waitlist takes way too much time. I just went on Twitter and found a couple of people with invites. I don’t have one yet, but would you want one when I do?
Sure, I’ll give it a go, thank you for thinking of me. The whole bullshit with Twitter and now Reddit has me feeling pretty burned on corporate-owned social media, so I’m likely to stick with federated things like Masto, Lemmy, etc., but I’ll give it a go. I am curious about it. I wonder why they’re leaning so hard on the waitlist thing? They’re losing precious adoption time, as people are right now wanting to move away from Twitter. Or rather, they have been wanting that for months, so there may already be a lot of lost opportunity re: user attention or interest.
The issue is that they rely on “related” content. I would much prefer an elimination system.
All the content on my feed should come from unpersonalized suggestions, or the communities i choose to follow. 👍
GIVE ME BACK MY DAMN 3.5MM HEADPHONE JACK ON MY PHONE!!!
This but with SD cards
User replaceable batteries
Rip my LGV10. May you bootloop in peace
I’ve been voting with my wallet on this one for years- no headphone jack, no purchase
It’s becoming super difficult now to be honest. I think I’m about to bite the bullet this weekend and just get a usb-c to 3.5mm adapter although it pains me deeply.
What phone do you use??? I’m looking at the S23 at the moment but I’m still on an S8 lol
I’m on a Sony Xperia 10 IV now. Amazing battery life, decent for one-handed use, has a headphone jack, SD slot, and meh camera. Mostly solid overall- agree the situation’s getting worse and worse every year
I remember switching to Android because you could replace the battery and expand storage, and those were huge selling points. But now my phone has none of those things. Although I guess a lot of stuff is in the cloud.
No question, removing swappable batteries was pretty brazenly consumer-hostile.
One of the main reasons I’m 100% on board with stuff like the Pinephone, at least in theory (just wish Linux phones were actually ready to be used as phones… maybe in another couple of years).
hard disagree. had my headphone cord caught in so much shit over the years I don’t miss it at all and the mild annoyance of bluetooth pales in comparison.
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I don’t think this is a boomer opinion but I got called a boomer for it once so maybe it is idk:
I think online dating is shit and I don’t mean it in a “It doesn’t work for me” kinda way but I believe it’s objectively shit. In an ever faster world that demands more and more flexibility from people that also extends to dating. It introduces a certain arbitrariness to romantic and sexual relationships. We now have dating apps that you can use to scroll through potential partners like a furniture catalog. It reduces people to a commodity and I hate being confronted with that. I believe it could in combination with the realities of late stage combination harm our ability to establish deep and meaningful connections to people.
It’s literally what my mom warned me off 20 years ago and now I believe she was right.
It’s almost like we need a new dating website in the fediverse.
Call it no fucks given
Sneaker culture is incredibly weird. Shoes made by children in China with a limited edition color are in such high demand that there are sites where people refresh F5 constantly hoping to have the honor to pay hundreds and hundreds for shoes that cost $7.50 to make. Then half of the time people won’t even wear them outside, they’ll put them in a bag and change shoes when they get to work or whatever. Or some might not even wear the shoes at all and just display them.
I’m an old soul in this sense. I love a quality goodyear welted shoe, and made in USA, UK, or Italy usually. An Allen Edmonds strandmok is a fantastic everyday shoe for me. I like to purchase nice things in general, use them, take care of them. I really hate throwaway culture as well.
Please nobody hate me for this, I’m a bit self conscious being an admin of my own instance and don’t want to piss people off haha. If you’re into gym shoe culture that’s awesome. If I knew you in real life I’d probably make fun of you for a minute if I saw you walking outside in socks carrying your $400 limited edition sneakers, but then you can make fun of me for one of the thousands of things I do and it’s all in good fun.
I don’t think you’re alone in that. I don’t even think it’s a thing that makes you sound older. That’s a niche hobby that some folks have like collecting miniatures.
I unserstand miniature collectors more than sneakerheads. There are only so many variations of sneakers but almost infinite miniatures of whatever
I don’t want to have a subscription for everything. It used to be possible to pay a one-time fee for software and use it as long as I want. Now I have to pay a monthly fee and once I finish paying, I can’t use the software anymore. And it’s not like I constantly get updates for the software. Often it stays the same for months or years.
I understand that software has a price, but no way these prices are sometimes justified…
